Women love the lie that saves their pride, but never an unflattering truth.

Writing was my real life and I was more at home with the people of my imagination than with the best I met in the objective world.

Never trust a woman who will not lie about her age after thirty. She is unwomanly and unhuman and there is no knowing what crimes she will commit.

The final result of too much routine is death in life.

Every leader of a great revolution is a fanatic and a Jesuit.

Success is a great healer.

The human mind has an infinite capacity for self-deception.

All women want to be understood until they understand themselves.

there is only one thing we do know and that is that we do not know anything.

the only revenge worth having is success.

... the irony of life is not that you cannot forget but that you can.

Remember the 11th commandment. Thou shalt not take thyself to damn seriously.

A theoretical grounding in agronomy must, therefore, include knowledge of biological laws.

You don't want too much fear in a market, because people will be blinded to some very good buying opportunities. You don't want too much complacency because people will be blinded to some risk.

The life-world of human and animal experience, with colours, tastes, solid objects, is a perceptual effect of massed atoms.

Well, when I was six years old I decided, not that I was going to be, but with my usual modesty, that I was a writer.

I carried recipes in my head like maps.

We are like horses that must be broken; basically that one should submit to a pastor even if he is wrong.

The likely economic effects [of the war in Iraq] would be relatively small... Under every plausible scenario, the negative effect will be quite small relative to the economic benefits.

Hope is good. Without it, well, you do the math. But hope has to be like a prayer. Putting it out there to something more powerful than yourself.

I have an unending desire to be better and make myself a better person, better mother.